Daily Doses (Book Review): Brainwashed - Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority

“You’ve been misled, you’ve been had, you’ve been took” – Malcolm X. This is the opening quote to, what I believe, is a very powerful and inspiring book. Though this book was not on the reading list, I discovered it by means of another book called ‘Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery’ by Na’im Akbar, who Tom Burrell states he was inspired by. Both books touch on the unseen reasons as to why African-Americans remain disadvantaged. This book carefully looks into the history of the African-American community, and shows where our poverty, disunity, lack of opportunity, deep insecurity, lack of education, and self-hatred originated from, and how it is propagated today. As the quote suggests, we have been deceived and taken advantage of, possibly by our own ignorance.

Burrell opens up the book by letting us know that we as a people are greater than what we think we are, after which he questions why we still remain in a disadvantaged state, and why we as a people do not seem to be making a positive progress in American society.

“We are strong, survivors of the middle passage, the whip and the chains. We have survived centuries of terror, humiliation, vilification, and depravation. We are smart. Even when our literacy was illegal, we learned quickly, invented discovered, built, taught, and excelled against all odds. We are creative. Making our way out of ‘no way!’ and constantly birthing and rebirthing American art and culture.  So then why, after all this time, when calculating the achievement of the ‘American Dream’, are we still ranked at the bottom of almost every ‘good’ list and the top of every ‘bad’ list? Why despite our apparent strength, intelligence, and resourcefulness, do we continue to lag behind and languish in so many aspects of American life?” (Brainwashed Introduction page IX)

           

The answer of course becomes a broad and detailed discussion, linking back to our people’s mentality or consciousness. Burrell goes on to describe the answer to “cancer, that can’t be healed because it can’t be discussed honestly and openly.”  From this point in the book, Burrell begins to tell the story of how he gained personal insight into this problem, starting from childhood on up.

            Tom Burrell was born and raised in the south side of Chicago. He experienced poverty, just as many African-Americans do, and received government assistance. But despite this, he began to question the overall intent of government programs such as food stamps and public housing assistance because it represented an “unquestioned dependency” and to what he further described as “learned helplessness”, to which is he believed to be “reinforcements to a deep-seated, race-based inferiority”.

            Burrell launched a lucrative advertising agency (named Burrell Advertising), in which he promoted products and services not aimed at the African- American community. He began to give positive and realistic depictions of African-Americans in the media, a move which he described as “positive propaganda”. Becoming chief executive officer (CEO) of Burrell Communications, he made it his goal to “connect the dots from slavery and Jim Crow segregation to social and commercial propaganda” to fully understand the way blacks are viewed in America.

Burrell gave three points, taken from his extensive company’s research, which shed light on African-American psychosocial issues. According to Burrell, these issues stemmed from “circumstances arising from our experience as chattel slaves in America” (Brainwashed page XI).  His example points were:

·         Black preference for high end status brands was driven by the need to compensate for feeling of low self-esteem.

·         Our penchant for lopsided spending/saving ratio grew out of our need of immediate gratification, based on a chilling pessimism about an uncertain future.

·         We ‘over indexed’, spending disproportionate amounts in every product category related to cleanliness (from feminine douches and scented laundry detergents, to car deodorizers and household disinfectants), primarily to compensate for being historically stereotyped as being dirty.

“But in the propaganda against the Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world has ever saw to discredit human beings, and effort involving universities, history, science, social life, and religion” - W.E.B. Du Bois. As this quote suggests, what we have going against us is heavily entrenched into the fabric of our society.   As previously mentioned, Burrell linked the majority of the issues to their ‘genesis’ in American slavery.  He goes on to paint a broader picture, in which not only purchasing power is affected, but also relationships (social interactions) and personal lives. In 2004 Tom Burrell sold his advertising business, but did not abandoned what he called “real-life African-American cultural anthropology”. He wanted to find a way to utilize what he knew, about our people’s “brainwashing”…

How did this “brainwashing” come about? Burrell takes us far back into history, when slavery had its fresh start in the first American colonies of the 17^th century. During that time, people had to grapple with the moral dilemma of slavery. According to Burrell, “They desperately needed a way to justify the gaping divide between their God-fearing, freedom loving rhetoric and the nation’s increasing addiction to cheap slave labor” (page XIII).  So what was the solution? In order for slavery to successfully survive, both master and slave were indoctrinated, generation after generation, that “blacks would always and forever be mentally, physically, spiritually, and culturally inferior.”

While moving forward in time, we as a people had to continually prove our equality, even to ourselves. Burrell states that in an effort to do this, we “unconsciously the master’s dream, adopted his values, moved into his neighborhoods, and danced to his tune” (page XIII). Burrell continues to say that while we were in survival/assimilation mode, and progress to what we thought was true advancement, we never considered the priced we paid by leaving behind our own communities and people.

Burrell goes on to say that “our insistence to think we have from negative propaganda is wishful thinking.”  He says that during of the black power movements of the 60’s and 70’s (I’m black and I’m proud), we paid “lip service” to the ideals of true change, but that was not backed up by the “psychological machinery” needed to make permanent change. Simply put, we cannot truly change the social conditions of our people unless we can change our mindset.

Now this is where Burrell changes his focus in the book to the present, which he begins by describing the newly elected, President Barack Obama, as one who “may have reached his Promised Land, but most black Americans are still wandering in the wilderness” (page XIV). What did he mean by that? Burrell begins to slowly reference to an “illusion”, or what is known as a false or misleading impression of reality. Burrell couples Barack Obama’s presidency with the “illusion of racial progress”, implying that President Obama himself is an illusion which propagates that we are now in a “post-racial era”, or that racism towards us has subsided.

How I understood this particular passage, was that racism changed, into what was now, subtle, behind the line attacks, rather than outright and obvious. To me, that is the most dangerous form because we as a people cannot see who or what our enemy is; in Burrell’s case it was raced-based lack of self-esteem. He states “Over time, I’ve learned that the root of the problem wasn’t what was being done to me- it was what I’d been brainwashed to feel about myself.”

Reading this book, I agree that our brainwashing still continues; in what many call ‘the slave mentality’. Burrell outlines what exactly this mentality entails, as it is very close to home… To continue he asks several fundamental questions, such as:

·         Why can’t we build strong families?

·         Why do we perpetuate black sexual stereotypes?

·         Why can’t we stick and stay together?

·         Why do we keep killing each other?

·         Why can’t we stop shopping?

·         Why are black and beautiful still contradictions?

·         Etc…  

According to Burrell’s outline, I believe the majority of us still do think like slaves; for some very simple facts such as our youth answering or calling each other ‘nigga’ or ‘ho’, our women having a distorted view of beauty, why we place entertainment careers above scholarly education, among many other things.  If we take a good look at what our media gives us, we see the stereotypes played out in plain sight, although we no longer see them as stereotypes but as facts… We see black women breeding babies without fathers, as if it is a normal thing to do. We see black men jailed in confined, for either violence or possession of contraband, as if it is a normal thing. We see the face of poverty and government assistance as black (even though poor whites get it too), and treat it as normal thing. We read about the high dropout rates of black students in school and we see it as a normal! What we are thinking is normal, is not really normal. To me, it is in fact an illusion.

This is what Burrell called a “paradox of progress”, and it is the most important message of the book. Burrell goes on in detail of how our brainwashing is still conducted today through many examples. Because Burrell seems to lay out our problems and the roots of the problems before us, he gives the reader a chance to critically evaluate society. Overall, through this evaluation, we could begin to rectify our problems.